The Gates of Horn and Ivory
by damalur
Summary: Shepard and Garrus argue about armor, power output, and secrets - but not about who should feed the fish, because no one remembers to do that. FemShep/Garrus, oneshot.


**A/N:** Spoilers for Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC. Thanks to Odyle for the beta!

* * *

After the Collector Base, Shepard sleeps for twenty hours straight and then, for the following week, barely sleeps at all. The few hours both she and Garrus are off-duty at the same time, they're both out cold—but resting in the same bed is enough to tide her over, enough to keep her going through the Illusive Man's barrage of threats and reports to the Admiralty Board and repairs to the Normandy and a round of tedious, exhausting calls to the Council. As soon as the Normandy is flight-worthy, she orders Joker to plot a course for Illium and Liara, because there's no telling when or if the Illusive Man will decide the several million credits he invested in her resurrection are worth less than the trouble she causes him. Better to act swiftly and with prejudice, before he tips off the Shadow Broker.

He may have already. The thought lingers before she drops off, stretched out beside Garrus, his hand curled around hers.

Before the Shadow Broker, she feels with Garrus a small, private contentedness both precarious and completely foreign. They've made no commitments, no promises that would indicate their arrangement is anything more than two friends finding comfort and release together, but he continues to show up at her cabin door and she continues to let him in.

After the Shadow Broker, they argue _constantly_.

"Your engineers have been screwing with the power output to the forward battery," he tells her, one evening (relative evening—the skeletal gamma shift is on duty, the lights are dimmed in deference to resting crewmembers) in the mess.

"They aren't my engineers," Shepard says.

"They're part of your private army," Garrus says. She maybe reads the accusation into his tone. Maybe. The lack of sleep isn't doing her already challenged interpersonal skills any favors.

"Says the mercenary who is still outlawed in eight systems," she retorts, and takes her tray back to Sergeant Gardner. He, wisely, keeps his trap shut. In the following days, so do the rest of the crew. Shepard is at first pleased and then disconcerted by their unusual deference. She considers talking to Miranda or Joker, but her friendliness with Miranda is still new enough to be fragile and the day Joker gets touchy-feely with her is the day he sends the Normandy on autopilot into a sun and moves groundside.

She goes to Tali instead.

"You've been snapping, Shepard," Tali tells her. "Hand me that spanner?"

Shepard peers under the console, where Tali is wedged between two support struts, and passes the tool. "Snapping?"

"Snapping," Tali confirms. "I don't know much about human physiology, but maybe you need a break?"

"A break?" Shepard echoes. "Like shore leave?"

"You were resurrected and then immediately recruited to fight the Collectors. And before that was Saren, and before that you were serving as X.O. under Anderson."

"I suppose I could take a day off—"

"Or several," Tali says. "Or maybe a nap, Commander. You look like you could use the rest."

Not a kindergartner, Shepard wants to say, but Tali wouldn't understand the reference. "What are you tweaking under there?" she asks instead.

"Power output to the Thanix Cannon," Tali says. "Garrus has been grumbling."

"Of course he has," Shepard mutters, and rather than napping picks a fight with Garrus about his armor. He's still wearing the cracked, battered suit that should have been retired after he tried to take on a gunship, the stubborn ass, and he refuses to replace it.

"It still does its job, Shepard," he says.

"Structural damage isn't always visible to the naked eye," she counters, adding, "And it looks ugly," because she doesn't want to admit how her skin crawls when she remembers him bleeding out on Omega.

He sleeps with his back to her, that night cycle. When his breathing evens to a soft whiffle, she turns on her side and studies his back: the breadth of his shoulders, the thick, heavy plating of his cowl, the shadows where the blue sheets pool at his waist. She bought special bedding the last time they docked at the Citadel, blankets made of a turian fabric that wouldn't tear on Garrus's spurs. The strength in the fibers reminds her of canvas, but the texture is softer, more giving.

Liara sends her the location of an unmined system. Shepard orders the Normandy into geosynchronous orbit and sends Miranda in the shuttle to look for eezo. Jack worked out another upgrade for her implants—

She tells Garrus that Liara sent the system's coordinates. The news makes him disgruntled.

"Do you have a problem with Liara?"

"I have a problem with the Shadow Broker," he says. "That much unchecked influence could corrupt anyone."

"I trust Liara," Shepard counters.

"Maybe you shouldn't," Garrus says, and then stomps off to...calibrate, probably.

Shepard calls Miranda back and takes the shuttle out herself. She sleeps with the cargo and survey markers. Rather, she crawls in back with the survey markers and stares at the ceiling, wondering if the Council will allow her to operate in Citadel space, wondering if Tali or Samara or Zaeed will be the first to go. Wondering if Garrus won't buy new armor because he can't afford it.

After the battle, it's always like this—the letdown, the breathing period, the sudden vacuum of stress that leaves her floundering. Before, she's always been grateful for the respite. Twelve-hour days instead of fourteen or eighteen or twenty, time to break her armor down and clean the dust out of the joints? Paradise, at least until the restlessness sets in.

She checks the seal on her breather helmet three times before setting course for the ship. Paranoia; irritability; exhaustion. These things kill, she's seen enough soldiers fall to know that mental instability kills as surely as a slug or a grenade or a cannon.

When she calls Garrus to her cabin at the end of his shift, she doesn't mean to end up fighting _again_. In the time—the brief time, Shepard's startled to realize, less than six cumulative months in Alliance time for her—in the time they've known each other, she's seen so many facets to Garrus: the soldier, the lover, the mercenary who breaks mortal law to uphold something higher. She's never known him to be petty or cruel.

Until he calls her judgment into error, accuses her of cowardice, and as good as implies that their relationship is no more than some xenophilic fling born of curiosity and stress. _She_ calls him a thug and tells him that maybe his father was right to press him into C-Sec, since he clearly lacks the leadership and initiative to succeed as a Spectre.

That night she goes to sleep alone. She says "sleep"—that night she goes to bed alone, where out of habit she strips out of her uniform and crawls between the blue sheets and spends six hours watching the message light blink at her terminal. She should check her messages. She should go over the supply requisition lists. She should—

In the seventh hour she drifts off. She struggles back to consciousness from heavy dreams only when EDI chimes an alarm, and she spends her shifts looking at supply lists as if from a great distance. Garrus and she circle each other like two varren; she wonders if calling him into the ring would solve their problems. She wonders if the Council should evacuate the Citadel, if Ashley will ever understand the necessity of allying with Cerberus. She wonders if Cerberus didn't put her back together wrong.

She goes to bed and she gets up and she tracks down a geth patrol in the Exodus Cluster. She goes to bed and when she wakes up, the knuckles on her right hand are scraped raw and bloody; at first she can't tell if she chewed on her hand or if she slammed it into the bulkhead.

Garrus is sitting on her bed when she gets back from medbay. Shepard swallows and sits next to him, looks at the layer of medi-gel wrapped around her fist. Next time, she'd prefer the kind of problem she can shoot.

"I haven't been sleeping," she tells the corner. "And when I do, I dream, but I never remember..."

"I should have noticed," Garrus says.

"No. Maybe." Another of the damn fish in her tank is dead. "What are we really fighting about?"

He leans forward and props his forearms on his knees, mirroring her posture. "You shouldn't have read the Shadow Broker's dossier on me," he says.

"You should have told me about your mother."

"Probably," Garrus allows, "but you could have waited for me to say something, Shepard."

"Look, Vakarian—"

"I'm sorry, but I don't even know what—this—is to you, and you don't seem able to tell me, and I can barely say 'sex' to you without tripping over my own tongue."

"Oh," Shepard says. "I guess it's...whatever you want it to be."

Garrus huffs. "Helpful, Shepard, thanks."

"Do you think I'm limiting your leadership ability?"

"Do I care?" Garrus rumbles. "What we're doing, that's important work. You know I have your back."

"Yeah," she says. "Yeah. Thanks. And, uh, you know that goes for me, too, right?"

"I had hoped," Garrus says dryly, startling a grin out of her. "For what it's worth, sorry for not telling you my mother has a degenerative and probably fatal neural condition."

"Sorry for snooping in your files. And for finding out you have horrible taste in music," she adds, because otherwise they're going to be crying it out or doing bullshit trust catches any minute. "'Hurt Me Deeper,' really? Really, Garrus?"

"I've heard the crap you listen to," he says. "At least I don't loop the soundtrack for _Blasto the Jellyfish Stings_ before talking to the Council."

"Oh, shut it, Vakarian."

Somehow they've edged closer together, until her shoulder is bumping companionably against his. Sitting like this, she barely reaches his chin, but never has he made her feel small.

"You know, Doctor Chakwas told me you need to take some time off," he says.

"Really."

"Really," he imitates. "I'd like for you to meet my family."

"_Really?_"

"Really," he says with a straight face, but then they both crack into laughter. "Come on, I could use the moral support. It's been years since I've been to Palaven, and my sister told me Mom's doing better."

"I'd like that," she says. "But on one condition."

His eyes narrow. "What would that be?"

Shepard smirks and answers, "That you buy some new goddamn armor."


End file.
